Category Archives: 1. Isis

“There was a 650% increase in deaths from Islamic terrorism” in civilized countries during 2016 compared to the previous year.

Truth Revolt ISLAMIC TERRORISM inflicted more deaths across the Western world in 2017 than any year since 9/11, according to the annual Global Terrorism Index compiled by Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace. The report comes as France marks the second anniversary of the Paris attacks, a series of coordinated Islamic jihad suicide bombings and mass shootings across the city that killed 130 people.

YES!

Despite the decline in absolute number of terrorism-related deaths across the world in 2016, the focal point of violent Jihad is shifting from the Muslim countries to Europe, report suggests. Many European cities suffered deadly terrorist attacks last year; with Paris, London, Berlin and Brussels all targeted by Muslims.

Analyzing the impact of terrorism on the West, this year’s Global Terrorism Index concluded:

In OECD countries [world’s 35 leading industrialized nation], the Islamic State’s (ISIS) transnational tactics in combination with lone actor attacks inspired by the group contributed towards a 650% increase in the number of fatalities.

21 of the 34 OECD countries experienced at least one attack, with the majority of deaths occurring in Turkey and France. Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and Turkey all recorded the most deaths from terrorism in a single year since 2000. More than half of the 577 deaths were in connection to ISIS, whose attacks in Paris, Brussels and Ankara were amongst the most devastating in the history of these countries.

ISIS and its affiliates more than doubled the number of countries in which they were active jumping from 13 in 2014 to 28 countries in 2015, including many in Europe. This resulted in a record number of countries experiencing their highest levels of terrorism in any year in the past 16 years.

Many mainstream media outlets tried to downplay the growing threat of Jihad in the West as depicted by the report, deciding instead to highlight the fact that the absolute number of deaths resulting from terrorism fell by 10 percent to around 29,300 compared to previous year. BBC reported the finding of the Global Terrorism Index under the headline: “Global Deaths from Terrorism Drop.”

While that might be factually correct, there is no sugar-coating the fact that Islamic terrorism-related deaths in developed countries increased by a staggering 650%. The ideologically-driven Open Borders Policy and the resulting mass exodus from Arab and Muslim countries into Europe is inviting Jihad right into the heart of the Western world. No matter how leftist media spin the story, Europe’s death toll speaks for itself.

No amount of data or intelligence will make any difference if the political elite in the West continue to remain in a state of Jihad denial. Their virtue-signaling and refusal to face facts is leaving a long bloody trail in its wake.

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The Swedish state, in true Orwellian style, fights those Swedish citizens who point out the obvious problems that migrants are causing.

When police officer Peter Springare said in February that migrants were committing a disproportionate amount of crime in the suburbs, he was investigated for inciting “racial hatred”.

Currently, a 70-year-old Swedish pensioner is being prosecuted for “hate speech”, for writing on Facebook that migrants “set fire to cars, and urinate and defecate on the streets”.

The security situation in Sweden is now so critical that the national police chief, Dan Eliasson, has asked the public for help; the police are unable to solve the problems on their own. In June, the Swedish police released a new report, “Utsatta områden 2017“, (“Vulnerable Areas 2017”, commonly known as “no-go zones” or lawless areas). It shows that the 55 no-go zones of a year ago are now 61.

In September 2016, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and Minister of Interior Anders Ygeman refused to see the warnings: in 2015, only 14% of all crimes in Sweden were solved, and in 2016, 80% of police officers were allegedly considering quitting the force. Both ministers refused to call it a crisis. According to Anders Ygeman:

“… we are in a very difficult position, but crisis is something completely different. …we are in a very strained position and this is because we have done the biggest reorganization since the 1960s, while we have these very difficult external factors with the highest refugee reception since the Second World War. We have border controls for the first time in 20 years, and an increased terrorist threat”.

A year later the Swedish national police chief is calling the situation “acute”.

In 2015, only 14% of all crimes in Sweden were solved. In 2016, 80% of police officers were allegedly considering quitting the force. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven (pictured above) refused to call it a crisis. (Photo by Michael Campanella/Getty Images)

Sweden increasingly resembles a failed state: In the 61 “no-go zones”, there are 200 criminal networks with an estimated 5,000 criminals who are members. Twenty-three of those no-go zones are especially critical: children as young as 10 years old are involved in serious crimes there, including weapons and drugs, and are literally being trained to become hardened criminals.

The trouble, however, extends beyond organized crime. In June, Swedish police in the city of Trollhättan, during a riot in the Kronogården suburb, were attacked by approximately a hundred masked migrant youths, mainly Somalis. The rioting continued for two nights.

Violent riots, however, are just part of Sweden’s security problems. In 2010, according to the government, there were “only” 200 radical Islamists in Sweden. In June, the head of the Swedish Security Service (Säpo), Anders Thornberg, told the Swedish media that the country is experiencing a “historical” challenge in having to deal with thousands of “radical Islamists in Sweden”. The jihadists and jihadist supporters are mainly concentrated in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Örebro, according to Säpo. “This is the ‘new normal’ … It is an historic challenge that extremist circles are growing,” Thornberg said.

The Swedish establishment has only itself to blame for it.

Thornberg said that Säpo now receives around 6,000 intelligence tips a month concerning terrorism and extremism, compared to an average of 2,000 a month in 2012.

Some of the reasons for the increase, according to terror expert Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish Defense University, is due to segregation in Sweden’s no-go zones:

“… it has been easy for extremists to recruit undisturbed in those areas. …the prevention measures have been pretty tame… if you compare Denmark and Sweden, Denmark is at university level and Sweden at kindergarten level”.

Asked what the increase in people supporting extremist ideologies indicated about Sweden’s work to combat radicalism, Interior Minister Anders Ygeman told the Swedish news outlet TT:

“I think it says little. This is a development we have seen in a number of countries in Europe. On the other hand, it shows that it was right to take those measures we have. A permanent centre against violent extremism, that we have increased the budget to work against violent extremism, that we have increased the security police’s budget for three years.”

There may be even more jihadists than Säpo thinks. In 2015, at the height of the migrant crisis, when Sweden received over 160,000 migrants, 14,000 of them who were told that they were going to be deported disappeared inside Sweden without a trace. As late as April 2017, Sweden was still looking for 10,000 of them. Sweden, however, has only 200 border police staff at its disposal to look for them. One “disappeared migrant” was Rakhmat Akilov, from Uzbekistan. He drove a truck into a department store in Stockholm, killing four people and wounding many others. He later said he did it for the Islamic State (ISIS).

Meanwhile, Sweden continues to receive returning ISIS fighters from Syria, a courtesy that hardly improves the security situation. Sweden, so far, has received 150 returning ISIS fighters. There are still 112 who remain abroad — considered the most hardcore of all — and Sweden expects many of those to return as well. Astonishingly, the Swedish government has given several of the ISIS returnees protected identities to prevent local Swedes from finding out who they are. Two Swedish ISIS fighters who returned to Europe, Osama Krayem and Mohamed Belkaid, went on to help commit the terror attacks at Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station in the center of Brussels, on March 22, 2016. Thirty-one people were killed; 300 were wounded.

Swedish news outlets have reported that the Swedish towns that receive the returnees do not even know they are returning ISIS fighters. One coordinator of the work against violent Islamist extremism in Stockholm, Christina Kiernan, says that “…at the moment there is no control over those returning from ISIS-controlled areas in the Middle East”.

Kiernan explains that there are rules that prevent the passing of information about returning jihadists from Säpo to the local municipalities, so that the people who are in charge in the municipal authorities, including the police, have no information about who and how many returned ISIS fighters there are in their area. It is therefore impossible to monitor them — and this at a time when Säpo estimates the number of violent Islamist extremists in Sweden in the thousands.

Even after all this, the Swedish state, in true Orwellian style, fights those Swedish citizens who point out the obvious problems that migrants are causing. When police officer Peter Springare said in February that migrants were committing a disproportionate amount of crime in the suburbs, he was investigated for inciting “racial hatred”.

Currently, a 70-year-old Swedish pensioner is being prosecuted for “hate speech”, for writing on Facebook that migrants “set fire to cars, and urinate and defecate on the streets”.

With thousands of jihadists all over Sweden, what could be more important than prosecuting a Swedish pensioner for writing on Facebook?

A New Jersey Muslim convert, Gregory Lepsky, also known as Allah Abdel Rochman, has been arrested after trying to butcher his family dog (because Muslims think dogs are dirty) and then become a martyr for ISIS by blowing himself up with a pressure cooker bomb in Manhattan, federal authorities charged Friday.

FOX News Gregory Lepsky, 20, of Point Pleasant, was charged with one count of attempting to provide material support to ISIS. Lepsky was arrested at his home in February after the incident involving the family pet, and police subsequently discovered a pressure cooker and a digital trail indicating a Boston Marathon-style bomb plot, prosecutors said in Newark Federal Court.

Lepsky reportedly said he was going to place the bomb in a busy area of New York City — specifically in Manhattan — in order to kill as many people as possible.

Lepsky, a recent convert to Islam who goes by Allah Abdel Rochman, allegedly had previously told people via social media that he intended to fight on behalf of ISIS, and intended to deliver “a bunch of explosives” to where the “enemies” could be found.

“During searches of computers and other digital evidence linked to Lepsky, law enforcement found evidence of Lepsky’s plan to build and detonate a bomb as part of his support for ISIS,” federal prosecutors charged.

Both Lepsky and the dog were wounded when police initially responded on Feb. 21, and Lepsky allegedly told police while being treated at a hospital he planned to carry out his attack in New York City. The complaint said he told officials he pledged his allegiance to “Allah,” was planning to kill his mother and fatally stabbed his dog because it was considered “dirty.”

“Lepsky expressed regret for having tried to kill the family dog because, according to him, if he had not done so, the police would not have discovered his plan,” FBI agent Tara Jerussi wrote in a complaint filed Friday.

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According to the official narrative, the reason for the latest Gulf crisis in which a coalition of Saudi-led states cut off diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar, is because – to everyone’s “stunned amazement” – Qatar was funding terrorists, and after Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia in which he urged a crackdown on financial support of terrorism, and also following the FT’s report that Qatar has directly provided $1 billion in funding to Iran and al-Qaeda spinoffs, Saudi Arabia finally had had enough of its “rogue” neighbor, which in recent years had made ideologically unacceptable overtures toward both Shia Iran and Russia.

However, as often happens, the official narrative is traditionally a convenient smokescreen from the real underlying tensions.

The real reason behind the diplomatic fallout may be far simpler, and once again has to do with a long-running and controversial topic, namely Qatar’s regional natural gas dominance.

Recall that many have speculated (with evidence going back as far back as 2012) that one of the reasons for the long-running Syria proxy war was nothing more complex than competing gas pipelines, with Qatar eager to pass its own pipeline, connecting Europe to its vast natural gas deposits, however as that would put Gazprom’s monopoly of European LNG supply in jeopardy, Russia had been firmly, and violently, against this strategy from the beginning and explains Putin’s firm support of the Assad regime and the Kremlin’s desire to prevent the replacement of the Syrian government with a puppet regime.

Now, in a separate analysis, Bloomberg also debunks the “official narrative” behind the Gulf crisis and suggests that Saudi Arabia’s isolation of Qatar, “and the dispute’s long past and likely lingering future are best explained by natural gas.”

The reasons for nat gas as the source of discord are numerous and start in 1995 “when the tiny desert peninsula was about to make its first shipment of liquid natural gas from the world’s largest reservoir. The offshore North Field, which provides virtually all of Qatar’s gas, is shared with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s hated rival.”

The result to Qatar’s finances was similar to the windfall that Saudi Arabia reaped from its vast crude oil wealth.

The wealth that followed turned Qatar into not just the world’s richest nation, with an annual per-capita income of $130,000, but also the world’s largest LNG exporter. The focus on gas set it apart from its oil producing neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council and allowed it to break from domination by Saudi Arabia, which in Monday’s statement of complaint described Qataris as an “extension of their brethren in the Kingdom” as it cut off diplomatic relations and closed the border.

In short, over the past two decades, Qatar become the single biggest natural gas powerhouse in the region, with only Russia’s Gazprom able to challenge Qatar’s influence in LNG exports.

To be sure, Qatar has shown a remarkable ability to shift its ideological allegiance, with the FT reporting as recently as 2013, that initially Qatar was a staunch supporter, backer and financier of the Syrian rebels, tasked to topple the Assad regime, a process which could culminate with the creation of the much maligned trans-Syrian pipeline.

The tiny gas-rich state of Qatar has spent as much as $3bn over the past two years supporting the rebellion in Syria, far exceeding any other government, but is now being nudged aside by Saudi Arabia as the prime source of arms to rebels.

The cost of Qatar’s intervention, its latest push to back an Arab revolt, amounts to a fraction of its international investment portfolio. But its financial support for the revolution that has turned into a vicious civil war dramatically overshadows western backing for the opposition.

As the years passed, Qatar grew to comprehend that Russia would not allow its pipeline to traverse Syria, and as a result it strategically pivoted in a pro-Russia direction, and as we showed yesterday, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund agreed last year to invest $2.7 billion in Russia’s state-run Rosneft Oil, even as Qatar is host of the largest US military base in the region, US Central Command. This particular pivot may have also added to fears that Qatar was becoming a far more active supporter of a Russia-Iran-Syria axis in the region, its recent financial and ideological support of Iran notwithstanding.

As a result of the tiny nation’s growing financial and political “independence”, its neighbors grew increasingly frustrated and concerned: “Qatar used to be a kind of Saudi vassal state, but it used the autonomy that its gas wealth created to carve out an independent role for itself,” said Jim Krane, energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, quoted by Bloomberg.

Furthermore, Qatar’s natural gas output has been “free from entanglement” – and political pressure – in the OPEC, the oil cartel that Saudi Arabia dominates.

“The rest of the region has been looking for an opportunity to clip Qatar’s wings.”

And, as Bloomberg adds, “that opportunity came with U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, when he called on “all nations of conscience” to isolate Iran. When Qatar disagreed publicly, in a statement the government later said was a product of hacking, the Saudi-led retribution followed.”

To be sure, in a series of tweets, Trump himself doubled down on the “official narraitve”, taking credit for Qatar’s isolation (perhaps forgetting that a US base is housed in the small nation).

The cynics may be forgiven to assume that if Trump is tweeting that the reason for Qatar’s isolation is “to end the horror of terrorism”, even as the US just signed a $100+ billion arms deal with the single biggest supporter of terrorism in the world, Saudi Arabia, then indeed the Trump-endorsed “narrative” is to be dismissed outright.

Which again brings us back to nat gas, where Qatar rapidly emerged as the dominant, and lowest cost producer at a time when its neighbors started demanding the commodity on their own, giving the tiny state all the leverage. As Bloomberg adds “demand for natural gas to produce electricity and power industry has been growing in the Gulf states. They’re having to resort to higher-cost LNG imports and exploring difficult domestic gas formations that are expensive to get out of the ground, according to the research. Qatar’s gas has the lowest extraction costs in the world.”

Of course, with financial wealth came the need to spread political infludence: ”

Qatar gas wealth enabled it to develop foreign policies that came to irritate its neighbors. It backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and armed factions opposed by the UAE or Saudi Arabia in Libya and Syria. Gas also paid for a global television network, Al Jazeera, which at various times has embarrassed or angered most Middle Eastern governments.

And, above all, “gas prompted Qatar to promote a regional policy of engagement with Shiite Iran to secure the source of its wealth.”

And here the source of tension emerged: because as Steven Wright, Ph.D. Associate Professor at Qatar University told Bloomberg, “you can question why Qatar has been unwilling to supply its neighboring countries, making them gas poor,” said Wright, the academic, speaking by telephone from the Qatari capital Doha. “There probably was an expectation that Qatar would sell gas to them at a discount price.”

It did not, and instead it took a step backward in 2005, when Qatar declared a moratorium on the further development of the North Field that could have provided more gas for local export, adding to the frustrations of its neighbors.

Qatar said it needed to test how the field was responding to its exploitation, denying that it was bending to sensitivities in Iran, which had been much slower to draw gas from its side of the shared field. That two-year moratorium was lifted in April, a decade late, after Iran for the first time caught up with Qatar’s extraction rates.

As Qatar refused to yield, the resentment grew.

“People here are scratching their heads as to exactly what the Saudis expect Qatar to do,” said Gerd Nonneman, professor of international relations and Gulf studies at Georgetown University’s Doha campus. “They seem to want Qatar to cave in completely, but it won’t call the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, because it isn’t. And it isn’t going to excommunicate Iran, because that would jeopardize a relationship that is just too fundamental to Qatar’s economic development.”

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Whether nat gas is the source of the Qatari isolation will depend on the next steps by both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates and Egypt – are all highly reliant on Qatari gas via pipeline and LNG.

According to Reuters, traders startled by the development, have begun to plan for all eventualities, especially any upsets to piped gas supplies from Qatar to the UAE. The UAE consumes 1.8 billion cubic feet/day of Qatari gas via the Dolphin pipeline, and has LNG purchase agreements with its neighbor, leaving it doubly exposed to tit-for-tat measures, industry sources and traders said.

So far flows through Dolphin are unaffected but traders say even a partial shutdown would ripple through global gas markets by forcing the UAE to seek replacement LNG supply just as its domestic demand peaks.

With LNG markets in bearish mood and demand weak, the UAE could cope with Qatar suspending its two to three monthly LNG deliveries by calling on international markets, but Dolphin piped flows are too large to fully replace.

“A drop off in Dolphin deliveries would have a huge impact on LNG markets,” one trader monitoring developments said.

And since it all boils down to who has the most leverage as this latest regional “balance of power” crisis unfolds, Qatar could simply take the Mutual Assured Destruction route, and halt all pipeline shipments to its neighbors crippling both theirs, and its own, economy in the process, to find just where the point of “max pain” is located.

“The use of terror under this doctrine [Targhib wal tarhib, “luring and terrorizing”] is a legitimate sharia obligation.” — Salman Al Awda, mainstream Muslim sheikh, on the Al Jazeera television show “Sharia and Life”.

Part of the tarhib or “terrorizing” side of this doctrine is to make a cruel example of those who do not comply with the requirements of Islam. That is the reason Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and entities such as ISIS, intentionally hold ceremonial public beheadings, floggings, and amputation of limbs.

Islamic jihad has always counted on people in conquered lands eventually to yield, give up and accept terrorism as part of life, similar to natural disasters, earthquakes and floods.

After terror attacks, we often hear from Western media and politicians that we must accept terrorist attacks as the “new normal.”

For Western citizens, this phrase is dangerous.

Islam’s doctrine of jihad, expansion and dawah (Islamic outreach, proselytizing) rely heavily on the use of both terror and luring. Targhib wal tarhib is an Islamic doctrine that means “seducing (luring) and terrorizing” as a tool for dawah, to conquer nations and force citizens to submit to Islamic law, sharia. It amounts to manipulating the instinctive parts of the human brain with extreme opposing pressures of pleasure and pain — rewarding, then severely punishing — to brainwash people into complying with Islam.

Most ordinary Muslims are not even aware of this doctrine, but Islamic books have been written about it. Mainstream Muslim sheikhs such as Salman Al Awda have discussed it on Al Jazeera TV. On a show called “Sharia and Life,” Al Awda recommended using extremes “to exaggerate… reward and punishment, morally and materially… in both directions”. “The use of terror under this doctrine,”‘ he said, “is a legitimate sharia obligation.”

People in the West think of terror as something that Islamic jihadists inflict on non-Muslims, and it is. But terror is also the mechanism for ensuring compliance within Islam. Under Islamic law, jihadists who evade performing jihad are to be killed. Terror is thus the threat that keeps jihadists on their missions, and that make ordinary Muslims obey sharia.

An online course for recruiting jihadists contains this description:

“Individual Dawa depends on eliciting emotional responses from recruits (and building a personal relationship). Abu ‘Amr’s approach illustrates a recruitment concept called al-targhib wa’l-tarhib, which is a carrot-and-stick technique of extolling the benefits of action while explaining the frightening costs of inaction. The concept was introduced in the Qur’an and is discussed by many Islamic thinkers exploring the best way to call people to Islam (several scholars, for example, have written books titled al-targhib wa’l-tarhib). According to Abu ‘Amr, recruiters should apply the concept throughout the recruitment process, but emphasize the benefits of action early in the process and the costs of inaction later.”

In other words, recruiters of jihadists should start by emphasizing the “good stuff” first, the “lure” — the future glory, supremacy and fulfillment of every lustful wish, such as virgins in heaven. Later, they should threaten the recruits with “terror” and shame — the consequence if they fail to participate in jihad.

Part of the tarhib or “terrorizing” side of this doctrine is to make a cruel example of those who do not comply with the requirements of Islam. That is the reason Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and entities such as ISIS, intentionally hold ceremonial public beheadings, floggings, and amputation of limbs. Countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey are more discrete, but they tolerate and support honor killings; killing apostates; beating women and children, and torture and murder in their jails. The doctrine of targhib and tarhib is alive and well, not just in Islamic theocracies but also in the so-called “moderate” Muslim countries.

Islam has been using these “pleasure and pain” brainwashing techniques, and cruel and unusual punishment, from its inception and until today. While the Bible — the Western Judeo-Christian tradition — is in harmony with, and nurtures, kindness in human nature, Islam does the opposite: it uses the human instincts for self-preservation and survival to break the people’s will and brainwash them into slavish obedience.

Like the majority of Muslims, I never heard of this foundational Islamic doctrine when I was growing up in Egypt, but have felt the impact of this doctrine on my life — in every aspect of Islamic culture; in Islamic preaching, in my Islamic family relations; in how Islamic governments operate and how people of authority, in general, treat the people under them.

The Islamic doctrine of “lure and terror” has produced a culture of toxic extremes: distrust and fear, pride and shame, permission to lie (“taqiyya“), and rejecting taking responsibility for one’s actions.

Having lived most of my life under Islam, I am sad to say that people the West calls “moderate Muslims” are frequently, in fact, citizens who have learned to live with and accept terror as normal. For centuries, many have made excuses for terror, condemned victims of terror, remained silent or equivocal, and have even compromised with the terrorists to survive. The Islamic culture in which I lived looked the other way when women were beaten. When girls were honor-murdered, the question was “what did she do?” instead of “how could that be?” When Christians were killed and persecuted, many blamed the Christians for their own persecution at the hands of Muslims. The normal Islamic response to terror became: “None of my business.”

And now the Islamic doctrine of Targhib wal Tarhib, has moved to the West and aims at changing Western humanistic culture. It would replace respect for human rights, caring for one’s neighbor and the values of freedom and peace, with the values of bondage, terror, tyranny and fear.

Islamic jihad has always counted on people in conquered lands eventually to yield, give up and accept terrorism as part of life, similar to natural disasters, earthquakes and floods.

It did not take long for the Islamic doctrine of Targhib wal Tarhib to work on the psyche of Western leaders and media, who are now telling us to live with it as the “new normal.” Islam counts on turning everyone into “moderate” Muslims who will eventually look the other way when terror happens to the person next to you.

The new normal? Police help survivors of the terrorist attack on London Bridge, June 4, 2017. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

Being one of the more inept tentacles of the deep state, CNN was apparently caught staging Fake News in the aftermath of the ISIS claimed London attacks which claimed 7 lives and injured 48.

While ISIS supporters are celebrating the attacks, MSM propagandists have been hard at work pushing the “religion of peace” narrative – trotting out hijabbed women and a child to hold signs expressing Muslim outrage at the terrorist attacks.